Samir Salameh. 

RAMALLAH, August 16, 2018 (WAFA) – Renowned Palestinian-French artist Samir Salameh died on Thursday in Paris. He was 74.

Salameh was born in Safad, Palestine, in 1944 but fled the city with his family in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war to end up as refugee in Syria, where he went to school and studied art at the Damascus Fine Arts Academy. He graduated in 1972 and moved to Lebanon to work at the media office of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) where he spent three years developing the political posters of the resistance movement.

He then studied at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris and worked at a number of jobs that included teaching art and working on Arabic publications at UNESCO. He later obtained the French nationality and lived between France and Ramallah. Some of his work was destroyed during the Israeli war on Lebanon in 1982.

After returning to Palestine in 1996 for the first time since he was forced to leave it at age 4 years, Salameh got a chance to visit Safad, his hometown but later said he was not able to find his home.

In Ramallah, Salameh worked as an advisor and later director in the Ministry of Culture while he continued to paint and exhibit his work all over the world. He had several solo exhibitions between 1963-2005 in Syria, Morocco, France, Algeria, Cyprus, Germany, Tunisia, Denmark, Greece, Egypt, Yugoslavia, and Cuba and several group exhibitions in Cyprus, Berlin, Italy, France, Japan, Moscow, India, Australia, Canada, Sweden and other places.

M.K.